“We don’t have any first amendment to hide behind here,” my editor-in-chief told me. His tone was unmistakable: I was another one of those Americans who had never had to practice journalism in Asia. 

        I was in Hong Kong, a place with a press nearly as free as America’s. But Hong Kong is a speck surrounded by nations that are less free — some, not free at all. We had to make peace with enough of those jurisdictions if we were to survive as a business. 

        The publication I worked for in the early 1990s, Asiaweek, circulated mainly in Southeast Asia. We attempted to practice American-style journalism, and did fairly well at it. Our staff included Americans, Canadians, Filipinos, Indians, New Zealanders, and people from Britain; we employed a Pakistani who had been run out of his country years before, and several Sri Lankans who had fled Colombo. We thought of ourselves as a voice for truth and honesty — which we were, some of the time. But we had our limits. 

        One of the most common: don’t insult the head of state. In Thailand, we could criticize the prime minister, but the king could not be demeaned in any way. If we ran a photo of Bhumibol Adulyadej or his queen, it had to be on the top of the page, and not next to a drug dealer or a punk rocker. Thais are also sensitive about Buddhism. The Asian Wall Street Journal was briefly banned in 1990 over a story about errant monks. The Tourism Authority of Thailand asked the police to ban Dow Jones & Co.’s Far Eastern Economic Review for accusing them of cooperating with promoters of sex tours. The cops didn’t bother. Thailand was not so bad. The government, it was said, was harsher on the Thai-language press than the two English dailies or offshore publications like us. 

        In Indonesia, ruled by Suharto — no first name, just “Suharto” — for 25 years, we had to be careful not to frontally attack the dictator’s sons and daughter, who have arranged for their rice bowls to be filled by the government toll-road concession and a state monopoly on cloves, which are used in kretek cigarettes. Every big business deal (such as General Motors’ recent $100-million venture to assemble Opel cars) had a Suharto in on it. At my publication we could disclose these questionable connections, and even quote one of the few brave critics, but we could not campaign against the Suharto family. 

        There was always a line we could not cross. Powerful men set that line, and sometimes changed it. Officially, the line in Indonesia was that we count not stir up religious and ethnic animosity. We could not inflame the Islamic fundamentalists or make targets of the ethnic Chinese (3% of the population). We could not give a public platform to armed rebels. Indonesia is tougher on the foreign press than Thailand is, but not as bad as it was in the 1980s. Back then, we could not print Chinese characters, even in a photo of a Hong Kong street. 

        Hong Kong has a free press, and has China’s guarantee that the press will remain free after July 1, 1997. But a lot of people don’t believe that guarantee. China’s impending takeover of Britain’s last major colony already affects what people write and what sources say, especially Chinese who don’t have a foreign passport. It’s not the Chinese way to stick one’s neck out. In Hong Kong there’s the additional worry that somebody could be writing down your name. Maybe after 1997 you’ll lose your job, or your son won’t get into the university. Why chance it? 

        Many who plan to stay after 1997 want China’s promise of “one country, two systems” to work. My employer certainly did. Our company planned to keep our editorial offices in Hong Kong, so we tended to ignore stories that undercut China’s credibility. While I was there, Hong Kong’s lawyers had a long battle over the future composition and jurisdiction of the territory’s supreme court. It was a crucial issue: who was to have final say over a legal dispute in Hong Kong, the “Special Administrative Region” of Hong Kong or the government in Beijing? We ignored it. 

        After Britain appointed Chris Patten governor in 1992, Patten pushed China to agree that more seats in the legislature would be elected by popular vote. (China had agreed to one-third; the rest were to be appointed by the executive, or would represent banks, unions, professional groups, and the like.) We treated the story as a showdown between Britain and China. We did not see a victory over China as crucial to the people of Hong Kong. If we had, we would have given a sympathetic forum to the United Democrats of Hong Kong, the political party that swept the open seats in the colony’s first and only real election in September 1991. Instead, we spent 1992 and 1993 hitting the same story again and again and again: China’s economy is booming. Democracy and human rights, defined in an Asian way, could come later. When I left the magazine, there was a plan to proclaim Deng Xiaoping the Man of the Century. 

        This was not censorship; it was groupthink led by the editor-in-chief. But it had its roots in the impermanence of political freedom in Hong Kong and the need to survive in a world without a first amendment. 

        Of course, the first amendment cannot protect you from everything. In the U.S., if you attack an advertiser, it will pull its ads — count on it. You might not call that censorship because it’s private action, but it does affect your ability to publish what you think. 

        And just as America has social taboos (against men holding hands in public, for instance), it has editorial taboos as well, primarily about race, religion, and ethnicity. All American journalists know what these taboos are, and so do their readers. The same is true in Asia, except that there, the taboos (also about race, religion, and national identity, among other things) are often backed up by censors, police, and army officers — and in places like Sri Lanka, death squads. 

        In Hong Kong, we editors were under the umbrella of British rule. Most of our readers were not. If we angered the censors in their country, the offending issue could have pages torn out or, more likely, “get stuck” in the post office. We could not afford to have this happen very often, or we’d go out of business. 

        My publisher’s stated philosophy was that our only protection was objectivity and integrity. Under the First Amendment, the American press could afford to be irresponsible. We could not. We had to be “fair.” We were not always fair, but were damn sure not to be unfair to the governments of countries where we were vulnerable to political interference. 

        We did have an editorial bias  — explicitly pro-free trade and pro-capitalism, and pro-Asia politically and culturally. We liked democracy, but objected to the U.S. trying to push it on a government, like China’s, that didn’t want it. We felt free in editorials to lecture the United States, the British Hong Kong government, and (more gently) the Philippines and Japan; those countries had free presses. We thumbed our noses at totalitarian North Korea and Burma, where we had no circulation and no prospect of getting any, and demanded the release of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi. But we were almost entirely silent about China’s political prisoners, and we never brought up Tibet or promoted the Dalai Lama. We accepted that Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan were part of China. We had no circulation in China yet, but we had dreams of it, and hoped to stay in Hong Kong after 1997. 

        And of Malaysia and Singapore, our big rice bowls of circulation, we had no real criticisms at all. 

        Unlike Vietnam, Burma, and China, where the state owns the media, in Singapore and Malaysia the press is private. We were permitted to circulate there if we played by the rules. In those countries, the state influences the press through licensing, official-secrets laws, and indirect ownership ·of shares in media companies. For foreign press like us, control is maintained through approval of correspondents’ visas, and occasionally, an outright ban. 

        For publications too important to ban, there are other ways. Singapore’s weapon against the foreign press is “gazzetting,” a fixed limit on circulation. You can publish what you like, but if you’re gazzetted, only a handful of people in Singapore can read it. The newsstand copies of gazzetted publications carry stickers with official serial numbers. If your circulation limit is too low, no advertiser who wants to reach a Singapore audience — the richest in Southeast Asia — will consider you. Instead, they’ll buy space in the Straits Times (circulation 342,000) or the New Paper (circulation 92,400), both owned by Singapore Press Holdings, which is indirectly controlled by Singapore’s government. 

        Singapore unleashed gazzetting in 1986-87. It cut Time’s international edition from 18,000 copies a week to 2,000 copies coverage of an opposition member of parliament (at one time the only opposition member).* Asiaweek was cut from 11,000 copies a week to 500 over an article about supposed Communist conspirators detained under the Internal Security Act. (One Singaporean was detained without trial for 23 years under that law.)**  The Asian Wall Street Journal was cut from 5,000 copies a day to 400 whenit questioned the Singapore government’s motives for setting up a second stock exchange. The AWSJ offered to circulate for free to subscribers; Singapore agreed if it removed its advertising. The AWSJ declined, and pulled out. It continued to be printed in Singapore, but only for non-Singapore markets.